The E61 is sold as an email oriented phone. I've spent a significant amount of my first week of ownership trying to get an email client that does the job. What follows is a summary of my experiences.
Series 60 Messaging. Is it really two years since I last used a Series 60? The email client in the Messaging application seems to have hardly changed. Its support of IMAP and POP3 is adequate and the one line display summary is fine. However in use its short comings quickly become apparent. There's no intelligence in there. The header or whole message approach just doesn't cut it. Auto-retrieval sort of works, but I've had it retrieve deleted messages, old read messages appear as "new" and the worst is when it just stops retrieving. The font size when displaying messages is too large too.
Mail for Exchange. All the E61 blogs recommend this client. It integrates well with the phone and does a reasonable job of intelligent content fetching. But, and its a big but, it only works with Exchange. Sure Mail2Web is free, but its not my company's email provider. I don't want to and can't forward all my work email to an external mailbox. My experience with M4Exchange indicated that the auto-fetch was heavy on battery life. The phone died in about half a day. I did like its peak and off-peak settings for auto retrieval. If you use Exchange or don't mind creating yet another email account, Mail For Exchnage is worth a look. However, for me its unusable.
Profimail. Another application that seems to have hardly changed in two years. Its problem used to be with coping with large amounts of mail or many IMAP folders. I don't want all my mail on my phone, but I do want access to it. Downloading my current mail used up my trial before I got to find out if its IMAP handling had improved since I last used it. The colour scheme is an acquired taste.
Movamail.
A Java based mail application that was simple to install and configure and was happily retrieving my IMAP based mail very quickly. Everything is done via MovaMails own server so they can compress the mail before sending it. I imagine that the client app is kept small too by not having to have inbuilt POP3 or IMAP support. This server centric approach does have a down side. If I'm out of coverage when I start the app - no mail. Rather than a standard menu system Movamail uses a very attractive dialog driven approach. Unfortunately the attention paid to the presentation of these is not carried through to the program where the inbox view is particularly poor. In use it presents headers and retrieves an initial mail fragment well. I find it annoying to be constantly asked whether I wanted more text or entries to be retrieved on scrolling - just do it for heavens sake. One of the risks of the Java approach is integration with the phone. For instance, new mail doesn't appear on the standby screen and I cant choose a sound from the phone. MovaMail does at least read email address from my Contacts. I just did it wrong. I couldn't find away of editing its mistakes either. I finally gave up with MovaMail when it crashed during mail retrieval.
Update:In retrospect, I'm not comfortable with a client app taking login data and storing it (and copies of my email) on a remote server without a clear warning and my explicit agreement.
GMail.
At last a phone that the GMail app installed on and worked. My first impression was good being presented with an attractive, clean and easy to use UI. Rapid header retrieval, automatic fetching of messages and entries as I scrolled all worked well. The GMail app doesn't try to download all my email yet it does let me search all of it. It seems to read my phone contacts too. Its primary weakness is that it unsurprisingly it only works GMail. It also doesn't do rich formatting of email contents (which mobile client does?) and has a maximum size of email that you can read annoyingly truncating it at that point. Its other weaknesses: no auto retrieval, no IMAP support and always displaying URLs as links through the Google transcoder. I'll definately continue using this application to read my GMail, but not my work email.
Update: There is one other problem with the GMail client on the E61. On contact search only the numeric pad works making search useless if you have more than 30 or 40 people. Luckily I dont initiate much mail via GMail and rely on Reply.
Three Mail.
I'm fairly sure that Three's mail package is based on Seven's Personal Edition. This application relies on a deskyop connector running on my PC. I have two problems with this. Firstly, I want a mobile mail solution. I don't want to have to rely on my PC being turned on when I'm not at home. If I'm away for a short period of time I expect the machine to sleep. If I'm away for longer I'll turn it off. The second problem is that I have a Mac and cant find a redirector for it. End of trial.
So after many downloads and installs I'm using the standard Series 60 Messaging app for for my work email. Its really not very good, but the opposition isn't either. All I want is:
- My recent or selected emails on my phone (efficient memory use)
- Search access to the rest
- Fast, reliable and battery efficient auto-retrieve
- Efficient use of the large amount of screen real estate
- IMAP support
- Attachment download
- No PC Desktop connector!
I don't think any of those is unreasonable.
Blackberry really doesn't have anything to worry about if this is the best the smartphone developer community can do.
